


Invisible

by monkeystypinghamlet



Category: Nothing Much to Do
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:02:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2331128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monkeystypinghamlet/pseuds/monkeystypinghamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A backstory to John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Invisible

**Author's Note:**

> I thought about this a lot last night so I decided to fic it this morning. Wow, it took a lot more writing than I expected!
> 
> Inspired by all the theory posts I've seen in the tag ([this one](http://redhotjuliuspeppers.tumblr.com/post/97870400966/came-back-from-work-and-saw-that-people-are) in particular) and of course, the incredible new episode "[CONFESSION](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugp-xi6Y2Ww)".
> 
> All written to dubstep music, in particular these two songs:
> 
> [Diamond Eyes - Leave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzSxHfhyQoI)
> 
> [SirensCeol - Echoes Guide Me (feat. Jeff Sontag)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVXGd7haSTk)

 

He stays by the hospital bed till well past midnight. He keeps his fingers wrapped around his mother’s hand on top of the sheets, waiting for the end yet praying that it won’t come.

“John…” His mother squeezes his hand and utters his name but that is the last thing she will ever say.

The machine starts to beep and other people flood the room.

He will not cry. He will. Not. Cry.

There’s a hand on his shoulder.

“Let’s go,” a voice says. John takes one last look at his mother before gathering up his things and his suitcase.

When he was little, he always wanted to meet his biological father. But not like this. This feels like an exchange, losing his mother and gaining his father all in the same week.

 

What little family he had left in England all agreed that it was the easiest solution. None of them are able to provide for or look after John, and his mother had finally reached out to the man that she’d been putting off contacting for years. His reaction to finding out that he had a son was perfectly normal and he was willing to fly out immediately.

John tries not to think about the fact that his parents only knew each other for a very short time. That his father was on a business trip and that he was married. That he still is.

He never thought about the fact that his father might already have a family: a wife and a son. When John hears the age of the son, he feels guilty. He doesn’t want to know how the wife reacted when she found out about John.

 

There’s a lot of white, empty spaces. The airport. The waiting lounge, the plane itself, the endless terminals that they trek across. John has never been on a plane before. Everything is unfamiliar in the sky, from the metal bird surrounding him to the man sitting beside him.

John doesn’t really know how to feel.

His bedroom. His new, empty room in his new New Zealand home. He can tell that it’s been frantically cleared for him. There are still piles of folders and trophies by the door when he arrives.

“I’ll move those soon,” his new brother promises. It takes him a month to keep his word.

He learns a lot of new names. Dad feels fine for his new father but Ann and Pedro must be addressed by name. Ann suggests to John that he call her mother but he refuses. That would be harder for both of them.

Everyone is nice enough but they all feel like strangers. Nothing feels like home.

 

He starts school. Although he is used to high school politics, Messina is a whole different world. It’s already the middle of term so everyone has been settled into their friendship groups for a while now and John is left alone.

Every teacher addresses him as “John Donaldson” which definitely does not feel like his name. His father must’ve enrolled him as that, assuming that John would take his name from now on out of convenience.

John can understand that but would have liked a warning.

“Donaldson” is much more fitting for someone like Pedro, whose trophies were only the first indicator of his talent. Everyone in John’s classes knows exactly who Pedro is and the only time John is ever mentioned is when they talk about “Pedro’s younger brother.” 

Every day when he gets home, he lies on his bed staring up at his white ceiling trying to recharge. He plugs in his headphones and listens to a lot of loud dubstep, trying to stop all the thoughts in his head.

It doesn’t work.

 

Emails start arriving from some of his friends back in England. They say lots of nice and comforting things but John only ever sends back short replies or nothing at all. He doesn’t want to give them bad news.

He stops joining the family for dinner. After a few days, Pedro comes up to John’s room and asks him to eat dinner. When John refuses, Pedro starts getting mad and they yell at each other. When Pedro eventually leaves, he bumps into John’s chest of drawers and a photo frame falls off. It shatters onto the ground as Pedro slams the door and the tiny pieces of glass stick into the carpet. John can’t help it, he cries over the broken frame as he picks his mother’s photo up off the floor. It’s from a few years ago, the two of them by the beach.

When his father comes up, probably intending to ask about John’s absence at dinner, his eyes go straight to the broken frame and he offers to fix it. He returns the next day with the photo newly framed. John thanks him but it’s another sign that this family is trying to reshape his old life into something they can accept. But it’s his father’s attempt at a peace offering so John goes back to eating dinner.

 

It’s a week before anyone talks to him at school. When someone actually directly addresses him, he almost dies of shock.

“I like your shirt,” she says. John is very surprised.

“You’ve heard of Fife and the Drums?” he asks. They’re a British band and very big back home, but when he mentioned them to Pedro once he might as well have been speaking gibberish.

“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, I’ve only heard one or two of their songs but they sound alright. There’s a guy in the year above us who’s obsessed with them. He’s British, too.”

“Oh,” John says. “Cool.”

“You’re John Donaldson, right?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, grimacing at the name.

“Nice to meet you,” she says. “I’ve heard so much about you, I wanted to put a face to the name. I’m Hero Duke.”

“Hero,” he says. “That’s an unusual name.”

“I guess. I’ve gotten used to it.” The bell rings and for the first time John doesn’t actually want to leave class.

“Well, if you need anything or get lost or something, let me know,” Hero says.

“Do me a favour,” he says. “Don’t call me Donaldson. Call me John Marshall.” If she’s perplexed by this, she doesn’t show it. She nods and they part ways.

 

John starts noticing Hero at lunchtime and wishes he had the courage to go and talk to her. But she sits with a large group of friends and he sits in the corner. He’s aware of the social boundaries and doesn’t dare break them.

But the following day she sits next to him in history again. She whispers funny things when the teacher’s got his back turned and it actually makes John smile.

He still doesn’t approach her during lunch. He wonders for a while if she’s ever looked out for him, but John is pretty good at being invisible.

 

The year passes, each day dragging out into the next.

John settles in to the unusual rhythm of his new school and begins to learn how to bend the rules. He starts skipping biology every now and then when he’s not feeling so great. The teacher never notices or at least never chases him up about it.

Once when he is doing this, he bumps into someone in the corridor.

“Oi, watch it,” she growls at him.

“Maybe _you_ need to watch where you’re going,” he snaps back. Even though he thinks things like this all the time, it’s rare for him to say them aloud so he waits for the girl to explode. She doesn’t. She laughs.

“I like you,” she decides and he finds it a little strange. After a week of skipping bio together, he discovers that maybe this is because the girl has limited friendship options just like him. She’s a bit weird but it’s been a while since he had a friend so he lets her stick around. And now he has someone to sit with at lunch.

 

His dad and Ann beam when he says he’s made a friend.

“Oh, that’s lovely!” Ann says during dinner. “What’s his name?”

“Her,” John says. “Cora.”

“Well, Cora is welcome to come over here anytime you like.”

“What?” Pedro protests. “But you never let me have girls over!” John sees this as a victory on his part.

 

School picks up a bit as he meets friend number two. Well, friend is a bit of a stretch but there’s not really another word for it.

John spends a lot of time by himself after school whenever Pedro has football practice and he’s waiting for a lift home. He often sees one of the players on the team kicking around a football by himself, so he asks if he can join in.

He gets a weird look but they guy shrugs and says, “Sure.”

They play one-on-one for a while and John expects to get his butt kicked but he’s actually not that bad.

“You’re alright,” the guy says. “Why haven’t you gone out for the team?”

“It’s kind of my brother’s thing,” he replies.

“Ah. You’re John,” the guy realises. “I’m Robbie.”

A week later Robbie gets kicked off the football team and John gets an earful of complaints. Most of it is about some guy called Claudio who John realises is the boy who’s been following Hero around for a while now. Even though John wouldn’t call Hero his friend, he still didn’t like the way that Claudio was looking at her. He wonders if she even notices.

 

All Pedro talks about for weeks at home is some big game coming up. All Robbie complains about is not being able to play in it. All John does is watch Claudio’s behaviour. He starts piecing together all the information and realises that he can actually form a way of bringing all this together, of shutting Pedro up, giving Robbie what he wants and bringing Claudio to some kind of justice.

So he does it. It’s been a while since John has acted purely out of his instincts, that he’s done something non-passive but he likes how it feels. All the plotting and scheming was nothing compared to the adrenaline rush he feels when he actually does it, when he pulls that fire alarm.

He gets in trouble for it, like he expected, because he hadn’t really thought of an escape plan. But he’s learnt to stop listening to what people say about him by now.

 

Naturally the school have to arrange a rematch the following year. John doesn’t want to go, but both his father and Ann insist that he show up to support Pedro. It’s a pretty uneventful game until afterwards when he sees Hero flirting with Claudio and feels sick for reasons he can’t explain.

John knows that he wants to leave immediately but the rest of his family want to stay and celebrate the victory. He convinces Pedro to give him the car keys to get home but it’s a struggle and John knows that he’s just a constant annoyance to Pedro.

He drives home in silence and slams the front door when he gets to the house.

That night he finds Hero’s channel and starts watching the videos she makes with her cousin.

He wishes that he could call Hero his friend.

 

He keeps his distance and continues plotting. The football rematch has reminded him of pulling that alarm and now he wants to cause the downfall of Pedro and Claudio. He starts writing in a black notebook and carries it everywhere. He never lets anyone see inside it, much to Cora’s annoyance.

He receives an invitation to Hero’s sixteenth. It’s a mailed letter and he receives it on the same day that Pedro gets his, but John feels his is more precious.

It’s addressed to John Marshall. It feels like a small acknowledgement of the fact that they don’t know each other very well, but they could be great friends. It hurts John to think about this.

He tucks the invitation inside his black notebook and uses it to his advantage. Over the next few weeks, he lines up all the pieces of his puzzle so that it all fits together.

The night goes off without a hitch and John feels that rush again. It’s unlike anything else he has felt in this foreign country.

It says: You are not invisible. You are here.

 

But then things start to change. Hero doesn’t come back to school. One day and John doesn’t think much of it. But then the days start piling up and before long they turn into weeks and John finds himself panicking. Where is she? Is she okay?

He finds himself feeling more and more anxious as the days go by but he has no way of finding out about her unless she showed up at school.

He starts receiving emails from friends in England again. One says that he and his family are coming out to New Zealand. Would John want to meet up?

John doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t reply.

The emails keep coming. The friend gives details of where he is staying, just in case John changes his mind.

 

John doesn’t think much of the weird texts he’s been getting from Cora until Watch Projects upload all those videos in one night.

John watches every one holding his breath, hoping for news of Hero. The only video on her channel in this whole time was of her cousin and John is desperate.

The fourth video goes up. John breaks.

The words “Hero is dead” go round and round in his head. He leaves his room and calls out for someone but remembers that everyone is at a football dinner of Pedro’s that he refused to attend.

John goes into Pedro’s room and searches for his phone which he has a habit of forgetting. He finds it on his bed and manages to guess the password.

He calls Hero. The phone rings. But all he gets is the voicemail.

John doesn’t know what to do. People are saying that Hero is dead and it could be his fault.

He goes back to his room and finds the emails from his friend.

He dials.

“Hey, John!”

“Luke, hi,” John says. “Could I come stay with you for a while?”

 

John packs some things and leaves. He’d dreamed about the day of leaving this place but he didn’t think it would feel like this. There’s too much dread piling up in his stomach.

Luke is incredibly nice about letting him crash for a couple of days.

“Anything for an old friend,” he says. Luke came to the hospital to visit John’s mother, so John knows that Luke understands without him having to explain anything.

John checks the channels every day, hour, minute, hoping for something. He makes all kinds of bargains and deals - if there’s news, he’ll be better to his new family. He’ll stop skipping class at school. He’ll do anything for a sign that Hero is alive.

 

The afternoon that he gets Beatrice’s video, he almost screams with joy.

“She’s alive,” he says to himself over and over. Thank God. Thank everything. He’ll stop now, he will. He can’t do this to other people, no matter how it makes him feel.

After more tossing and turning, one early morning he decides to make a video of his own. He borrows a camera from Luke and confesses everything. It comes out filled with hatred and John detests hearing it all, but it needs to be said.

He wonders about where to upload it. He could start a channel of his own, but no one would ever see it. He got into Pedro’s phone pretty easily, could he get into one of the three channels?

Not Ursula, John reckons. Her password would be really detailed. And he doesn’t like the thought of hacking into Hero’s channel.

So he chooses Ben’s. That was where Pedro had uploaded his cry for John to come home, anyway. It takes John about thirty seconds to get in. He leaves the video uploading while he falls back asleep.

 

A couple of days later, he gathers the courage to pack his things and go home.

“Good luck,” Luke wishes him. “Let me know how everything goes.”

“Thanks for everything,” John says.

John spends a long time sitting on the porch by the front door, trying to work up the nerve to go inside. Eventually when he knocks, his parents are angry but above all relieved and happy to see him again.

It’s the first time New Zealand feels like home.

 

John works up the nerve to go to Pedro’s room again.

“I know I don’t deserve anything right now,” John says, waiting for Pedro to explode and kick him out. “But I know that Hero’s in the hospital and if it’s possible, I’d really like to see her.”

Pedro doesn’t say anything so John leaves and sits in his room, cursing himself for being so stupid.

Pedro comes by John’s room and stands in the doorway.

“Beatrice will be here to pick you up in about an hour,” he says. “Be nice.”

“Thank you,” John says.

 

“We’re making messages because we can’t visit her that much,” Beatrice explains as they enter the hospital. “But we can still visit a little. Pedro convinced me that you really needed to see Hero, so here you are. But if you hurt her, I will kill you.”

John doesn’t doubt this.

He hasn’t been to a hospital since his mother passed away and going back isn’t all that pleasant but he reminds himself that he’s here for Hero.

“Hey,” she says softly when he enters. “It’s been a while.” He pulls up a chair and sits next to her hospital bed.

“I -” he starts. “I’m not sure how much you know about what I’ve done,” he says. “But I’m really, really sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Hero says. “Bea’s been telling me everything that’s been going on and I’m not sure how to feel right now but you have my forgiveness. It might take me a while to show it, but you’ve got it.”

“That’s okay,” John says. “Take all the time you need. But whenever you’re ready, I’d really like to start being your friend.”

 

John goes with his parents to see a therapist and despite his initial protests, it helps. If anything, it gives him someone to talk to who won’t judge him or question him in any way.

 

When he goes back to school, he finds $300 taped to the inside of his locker from a certain someone. 

He goes to a flower store after school to spend it. His mother always used to say that flowers speak when words cannot.

John ignores the strange glances from the woman in the shop and buys four bouquets. One for Luke and his family, for letting John stay so long. For Hero in the hospital. For Beatrice and Hero’s brother at home. And for his parents and Pedro, for scaring them by running away.

John knows that this wouldn’t fix everything. He knows that he has much more apologising and explaining to do.

But this is a start.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> To remember: backstories explain bad deeds but do not excuse them.


End file.
